The Story of American Freedom

Foner states, “Few events have transformed American life as broadly and deeply as World War II” (219). Chief among these transformations was the massively expanded size and scope of the federal government. In addition to a historic economic boom due to wartime production and nearly full employment, the nation’s social geography was forever altered as tides of migrants left rural areas to fill open jobs in the industrial cities of the North and West (219). While the war’s rallying cry was freedom, its official statement of purpose was what Roosevelt described as four essential human freedoms. The Four Freedoms, as they came to be known, were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The latter of these had the most ambiguous meaning, but freedom from want “seemed to strike the deepest chord in a nation just emerging from the Great Depression” (225).

Foner argues that “Americans’ understanding of the war’s purposes were vague and inconsistent, and that the populace seemed more fervently committed to paying back the Japanese for their attack on Pearl Harbor than ridding the world of fascism” (227). Because of this, the Office of War Information (OWI), an agency established in 1942 to mobilize public opinion, utilized media to provide citizens with an ideological meaning of the war without replicating the nationalist backlash from World War I (227).